Category Archives: Free

“Free” has become ubiquitous in the digital age. It has been touted widely as the only mechanism which is a necessary condition or an iron law for providing digital products and services across the Internet. More exactly, there is an inexorable pressure upon price points on digital products whose marginal cost of production is minimal. So business models are cropping up and encouraging the consumers to chart an “Internet Consumer Bill of Rights”: the business models painfully and reluctantly argue that the consumers’ personal information is being exchanged to get these “free” products which can be monetized by advertisements and the like. However, these toutings and exclamations by the pundits of “Free” have adversely impacted many industries that have been forced to go along with it, absent any immediate choice in that matter. Read the rest of this entry →

AS PART of an effort to streamline Economist.com and arrange things more logically, we’re closing down the Babbage blog. We’ll continue to post extra science and technology stories online, in addition to those that appear in the print edition, but these will now appear on the Science and technology page, rather than as posts on the Babbage blog. Our aim is t […]

IN THE end, Microsoft fooled everyone. The replacement for its widely disparaged Windows 8 operating system turned out to be not Windows 9, as expected, but Windows 10. No explanation, other than marketing waffle, was given as to why the company should skip a release number. “We know that based on the product coming, and just how different our approach overa […]

IF YOU want something done, the saying goes, give it to a busy person. It is an odd way to guarantee hitting deadlines. But a paper recently published in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests it may, in fact, be true—as long as the busy person conceptualises the deadline in the right way. Yanping Tu of the University of Chicago and Dilip Soman of the Uni […]

EVER since the “paperless office” was first mooted in a Business Week article back in 1975, its estimated time of arrival has always been ten years away. And so it remains. The amount of paper used in homes and offices has declined slightly over the past decade. And certainly an increasing number of organisations have managed to go paperless to some extent, […]

WHEN the autonomous cars in Isaac Asimov's 1953 short story “Sally” encourage a robotic bus to dole out some rough justice to an unscrupulous businessman, the reader is to believe that the bus has contravened Asimov's first law of robotics, which states that “a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to […]